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Crystal IS is a technology manufacturer supporting customers with highly technical products and long, project driven sales cycles. Their commercial process spans early stage evaluation, engineering collaboration, phased purchasing, and large scale production orders that can take years to fully mature.
As opportunities progress, Crystal IS must coordinate across sales operations, application engineering, and downstream teams to manage forecasting, approvals, and production planning. Small validation orders may occur years before a full project is funded, making traditional CRM funnels poorly suited to their reality.
To better support this complexity, Crystal IS partnered with OrangeDot, a certified monday.com Solutions Partner, to design a CRM system that reflects how their teams actually sell, quote, and forecast without sacrificing visibility or control.
Crystal IS was operating on Salesforce, but the system had become overly complex for day to day use. Required fields, rigid objects, and multi step workflows discouraged consistent adoption, leading to incomplete data and unreliable reporting.
Basic questions like where an opportunity stood, how long it had been stalled, or what milestone was next often required manual investigation rather than real time visibility.
Even simple pricing requests required creating multiple records, filling extensive required fields, routing approvals, and generating documents before responding to customers. This slowed down responsiveness and created unnecessary internal friction.
Crystal IS customers often purchase small quantities for evaluation years before a true project is defined. Traditional lead to opportunity models failed to reflect this phased buying behavior, where purchasing can happen well before a fully funded initiative exists.
As projects mature, demand can ramp dramatically from early validation runs to significant annual production volumes. Without a clean way to capture expected timing and volume, forecasting and production planning were reactive rather than proactive.
OrangeDot implemented monday.com CRM using a phased structure that clearly separated early lead development from true project driven opportunities. This allowed Crystal IS to manage early engagement without prematurely forcing opportunities into a rigid pipeline.
Leads were structured around companies first, with associated contacts and required fields such as industry and segment. Leads entered the CRM through internal prospecting boards, spreadsheet imports from events, and standardized forms, reducing junk data and improving consistency.
Once a customer reached the point of defining a real project, the record moved into an opportunities workflow designed to track milestones, timelines, and forecast details. This aligned CRM tracking with how projects actually unfold over multiple years.
OrangeDot configured monday.com’s quoting capabilities to support Crystal IS pricing and approval controls. Quotes could be generated from standardized product data, routed for review, and approved with a clear audit trail, without unnecessary record creation.
The CRM captured forecasted first year demand, mature annual volumes, and key timing milestones at the opportunity level. This gave downstream teams earlier visibility into future capacity needs, even while projects were still in development.
The solution accounted for scenarios where purchase orders come from contract manufacturers rather than the end customer. Account and contact structures preserved these relationships, ensuring clarity around who buys, who influences, and how orders flow.
Impact at a Glance
Phase based tracking and timestamped stages gave teams clearer insight into where accounts stood, what milestones were upcoming, and where opportunities were stalling, without relying on manual updates.
By simplifying the quoting and approval process, Crystal IS improved responsiveness while maintaining leadership oversight and audit history. Teams could answer pricing questions faster without bypassing controls.
Simpler workflows and fewer required steps increased day to day CRM usage. As adoption improved, reporting became more reliable and less dependent on manual cleanup.
Capturing expected annual volumes and milestone timing earlier in the lifecycle enabled Crystal IS to plan production capacity with greater confidence, even for opportunities that would not fully materialize for years.
